Picture "L'Eunuque Impérial" (1975)
Picture "L'Eunuque Impérial" (1975)
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limited, 50 copies | numbered | signed | colour lithograph on paper | framed | size 103 x 78.5 cm
Detailed description
Picture "L'Eunuque Impérial" (1975)
"L'Eunuque Impérial" is a work from the late career of the exceptional Catalan artist Joan Miró. The painter, graphic artist and sculptor created the colour lithograph when he had already been detaching from figurative painting for several decades and had turned to abstraction. It impresses with its pure colouring of a few tones and the use of black covering the whole surface. At first glance, ovals, circles, dots and red stripes of colour form a dynamic teeming mass, but on closer inspection, they represent excerpts from the artist's complex system of signs.
The title refers to a so-called eunuch, a man who is usually in a courtly position and has been castrated. Numerous myths have grown up around him in various cultures around the world. On the one hand, eunuchs are said to be insidious and scheming. On the other hand, they are considered to be sincere and loyal because of their taken ability to procreate. The fact that Miró, who was influenced by Surrealism, took up the eunuch as a figure could be related to his interest in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. In Freud's theory, castration anxiety plays a central role and becomes an explanation of gender-specific personality structures. Miró's fascination with the human soul and his confrontation with his masculinity were to remain important themes for him throughout his life.
Original colour lithograph, 1975. Edition: 50 copies on Arches paper, numbered and signed by hand. Catalogue raisonné Mourlot 1023. motif size/sheet size 80 x 56.5 cm. Size in frame 103 x 78.5 cm as shown.
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About Joan Miró
1893-1983, Spanish painter, graphic artist, sculptor and ceramist.
Joan Miró is considered one of the most important representatives of Surrealism. The artist, who significantly influenced abstract expressionism, found his own way to an abstract stylistic idiom of strongly outlined surreal forms, but without abandoning the connection to the object.
Joan Miró was born in 1893 in the Spanish art metropolis of Barcelona. He received drawing lessons as a child despite the initial reluctance of his father, who was a goldsmith and watchmaker. He visited a commercial college and the La Llotja art academy, where Pablo Picasso had taken art lessons just ten years before.
From 1919 onward Miró lived alternately in Spain and Paris. In the world capital of art as well as in Barcelona, he had his studio as of 1921. The renowned painting "Farm" was created shortly afterwards - it shows the transition from a realistic viewpoint to pictorial visions of dreams.
In Paris, Joan Miró also became involved with the eloquent Surrealists, among whom he remained a quiet outsider. Nevertheless, he exhibited with them in 1925. His paintings now became increasingly abstract and symbolic. A trip to Holland inspired him to paint the "Dutch Interiors". The following year, in 1928, he married, experienced an artistic crisis and, according to his own statement, wanted to "murder painting".
But Miró decided to keep it alive and triumphed. His precisely planned paintings become clearer, often containing only a few associative signs, symbols and archetypal elements such as stars, birds and eyes. They consist more and more of large, overlapping surfaces in strong colours that reveal Miró's strength as a colourist. The pictorial space becomes increasingly two-dimensional. They evoke an almost childlike effect.
Around 1930 he produced his first "Papiers Collés", collages and reliefs. In addition to his paintings, he also produced an extensive graphic oeuvre, such as lithographs, etchings and woodcuts, which made the artist popular. He also created surreal objects and ceramics.
In the first half of the 1950s, his work was dominated by graphic art and ceramics. He now lives in Palma de Mallorca and receives numerous commissions for wall ceramics in public buildings, for example for the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York or Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1964, the Fondation Maeght was inaugurated in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, for whose garden "Le Labyrinthe" Miró designed sculptures and ceramics.
Joan Miró's works were presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide. By 1941, the first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist received many honours and awards. In 1968, the city of Barcelona commissions the construction of the Miró Museum, for which the artist donates forty works.
Joan Miró died at the age of 90 on Christmas Day 1983 in Palma de Mallorca.
Term for paintings and sculptures that are detached from representational depiction, which spread across the entire western world and parts of the eastern world from around 1910 onwards in ever new stylistic variations. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, born in 1866, is considered the founder of abstract art. Other important artists of abstract art are K.S. Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, and others.
The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.
Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy, among others.